How to use u3-tool in Lucid

As my few blog visitors may be aware, I've been using the U3 customizer for windows for a long time on my 4GB cruzers to make them bootable.

http://blog.sllabs.com/2008/05/booting-heron-from-u3.html


I came across the u3-tool sometime ago when I bought my Clarion MiND, but I've only actually used it recently.

The U3 Customizer tools were released somewhere in 2005 and won't work in anything but windows XP 32bit, and won't recognize U3s over 8GB.



Gonzor discovered TwinMOS's application version supported Larger drives, Vista, and was released in 2007. However, the copy from TwinMOS didn't work for me -- and yet Gonzor's copy from mediafire did, both are version 1.0.5.5

I just bought an open-box 16GB Contour EXtreme with AES from newegg for $40, and it came yesterday.

So I started searching on how to hack a 16GB U3 drive.

"Oh, right, u3-tool... Almost forgot about that!"

In searching for 'how to use u3-tool', I ran across ubuntu launchpad bug report #534070 and played around a little.

I had some issues trying to get the windows version to work, I could resize the CD domain, but 'burning' the ISO failed consistently at 4-5% with a scsi error.

In Ubuntu Lucid, you can just 'sudo apt-get install u3-tool' but:
I was *NOT* able to get /dev/sg* or /dev/sr* to work -- I had to address the disk device itself as /dev/sdf to get it to work.

Hope this helps others out, as I think the major problem people are having is trying to use one of the /dev/sg like the u3-tool help text mentions.

Here's the log of the CD domain resize and burn I ran.

kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -i /dev/sdf
Total device size:   14.95 GB (16051601408 bytes)
CD size:             7.69 MB (8060928 bytes)
Data partition size: 14.94 GB (16043474944 bytes)
kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -l UbuntuLucid3264.iso /dev/sdf
CD image(1874288640 byte) is to big for current cd partition(8060928 byte), please repartition device.
kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -p 1874288640 /dev/sdf

WARNING: Loading a new cd image causes the whole device to be whiped. This INCLUDES
 the data partition.
I repeat: ANY EXCISTING DATA WILL BE LOST!

Are you sure you want to continue? [yn] y
kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -l UbuntuLucid3264.iso /dev/sdf
|**************************************************| 100%

OK

kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -i /dev/sdf
Total device size:   14.95 GB (16051601408 bytes)
CD size:             1.75 GB (1874329600 bytes)
Data partition size: 13.20 GB (14177271808 bytes)

After I changed the ISO, I also had to open Disk Utility (palimpsest), "Format the Disk"  to create a new MBR geometry, and then create a new NTFS partition.

(Which I've subsequently copied Windows 7's bootmgr to the root of the flash partition and ran "bootsect /nt60 U:", then copied the contents of the 7 install cd to the flash)

Both sections of the device are now bootable, the CD boots ubuntu lucid 32/64 TORAM=Yes, and the flash boots the 7 preinstallation environment.

(Yeah, I know the picture's screwed up -- I'll edit the blogspot CSS later.)

So that all worked just fine for me. Hope it does for you, too!

(And for the person who emailed me to ask about the background... It's from SSDD.)